


Shifted

by AnonymousVow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Leia putting up "have you seen this lost Jedi" posters, Rey adopts a doggo, Shapeshifter!Luke, who is also part cat, who is also part traumatized Jedi Master
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 21:43:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14174010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousVow/pseuds/AnonymousVow
Summary: Luke Skywalker copes with his nephew's betrayal and murder of innocent children by  fleeing from everything that he once was. Along the way, he runs into a girl on Jakku.





	Shifted

His school is fallen and his nephew - the namesake of his first master - is to blame. The blood of younglings stains the hands of Kylo Ren as it had his grandfather’s, and for lesser provocation. Fire burns at what Kylo Ren had left, carrion-fuel for bloody flames, and everything Luke had dreaded - everything the Force had told him was to come, unless he did what even his father had not, and turned kinslayer - has come to pass. He has paid a high price for holding on to his integrity, his principles. Was it a principle, or was it a weakness? 

It is too much to endure. It is too much to lose.

Luke Skywalker could not endure this. 

So Luke Skywalker is not. 

He flings himself into the Force, and the Force catches its beloved grandchild, and gives him the oblivion he needs, and the not-me he seeks. 

Luke Skywalker, in the last few moments of being Luke Skywalker, wields that last, unknown power of the Force - unmakes and remakes himself. Shapeshifting, the tales call it, the Daughter who is a winged gryphon, the Son who is a dark gargoyle, and now the Hero who was a Master and an Uncle and a Brother, is now....

R2D2’s lens whirs crazily as his master collapses into a pile of robes and something else leaps out. 

[Predatory mammalian quadruped in conformation, tending towards feline/canine. Furred, grey and white. Single-tailed. Eyes - non-compound, refractive, reflective, blue, single-paired. Reference - color exact chromatic match for Pilot Two’s.]

His logic circuits tell him that what he is witnessing is completely impossible. R2 tries valiantly to square this with the evidence of his own sensors, runs a self-check on both his logic processors and sensors, and cannot account for the results. One or the other must be malfunctioning. They cannot _both_ be running true. Overwhelmed, his system goes into a merciful shutdown to escape the infinite loop.

 

*** 

He runs. He hunts. He drinks at rivers, ponds, stream-trickles in dark caves. He brings down prey and devours their blood-hot meat all fresh from the kill, sleeps, wakes to run and hunt again.

He runs through forest, tundra, desert, shore. He skirts warily round gatherings of bright, loud sentient minds, snarling when one comes too close and fleeing towards the soothing simplicity of minds without full-formed sentient thought. 

Now and again there are minds that hurt him, voices that hurt him, because they pull at the him that cannot be, rake claws of remembrance across a soul wounded and bleeding. 

On Corellia, a tired voice calling for Chewie. 

On Mygeeto, an orange-clad male addressed as “General Antilles.” 

On Javaas, worst of all, a small dark-haired lady who blazes so bright, too bright, who they call “General Organa” and who actually casts her mind out for his, seeking, grabbing frantically, when he passes by...

When it happens, he _reaches_ , bends the space between him and away, and leaves the planet altogether. 

 

*** 

 

He finds himself on a planet that feels like home, the air hot and dry and clean, the sky endless, the sands warm under his paws. He stays. He hunts. 

The native fauna learn, at his fangs, to cede supremacy. He establishes himself as apex predator. It is delightfully empty, this desert-world. It is like home - but not enough (only one sun to the two that ought to be in the stark sky - sands pale instead of deep gold) to engage the him who should not be; there are no loud sentient minds to bother him; and it is easy enough to find water and prey. 

 

It is lovely to nap on the dunes, sun-heat baking his bones. It is lovely to run through the chill of a desert night, his tail swinging behind him as weighted balance. It is lovely to feast on the sweet meat of stump-legged thissermounts, or to leap into the sky and bring down juicy ripperaptors at one strike. (They’re not so delicious as other animals, but the rush of slaying-pleasure is even better when the kill is made in the air.)

And so time whirls past, as transient as dust-devils on a desert wind. He lets himself lope through the days, his mind filled with nothing more consequential than tracks through the dunes, water-seeking, hunting. He sleeps deep and often, dreamlessly. The hunter is happy, or at least as happy as he can be. 

Everything changes, one day, when the hunter runs across a lean girl-child with dark hair, and dark eyes, and a mind as bright as the sun above them both.

 

***

 

Rey is sweeping the southern flatlands for salvage when she hears it - the low-pitched, growling sound of an animal in agony. She feels her stomach twist in emphatic pain, turning the blunt nose of her hybrid swoop-speeder towards the animal’s need. 

She navigates as much by feel as by tracking sound, trusting to the instinct-quick intuitions that have served her so well throughout her life. She can feel the tug of injury, of suffering-endured, pain-that-burns, lonely-ever that emanates with more power than she has ever felt before. She hardly thinks; she simply goes. To ignore this need would be to ignore the need to breathe, to ignore thirst at high noon - it would kill her. 

She feels him (it is a him, that she knows at once) as if part of her fits inside his soul, or the other way around - more and better than she feels any of the people of Niima Outpost, whom she has known for years. 

The sun is burning-hot on her back as she speeds through the flatlands, far enough and long enough that she realizes she must not have really heard the noise - she has traveled past earshot-distance by now. 

She finds him in a small hollow between the start of dunes, a great hunting beast brought low. His right forepaw is tucked under him, and his white-and-grey coat is streaked with crimson from his many wounds. His left eye is shut, covered with blood, and his right eye blazes blue rage at her. 

“Shh, shh, my beauty,” she coos, inching closer. “Oh, you’re a big strong hunter, aren’t you? I know who you are. You’re the one they call the Grey King, aren’t you?” 

At Niima they say he is an escaped circus-animal, or some exotic beast being brought for some noble’s amusement, crashed and let loose into the desert. Neither nobles’ cargo or traveling circuses ever come near Jakku, but that is forgotten in the telling. They call him the Grey King, the one who rules in the wild wastes beyond where sentients go. No steeljaw or nightwatcher can kill him - instead, their bones and carapaces litter the sand where he has been, clawed pawprints the signature near them. Some had sworn (deep in their cups) they would win his pelt, or string his fangs to make a necklace, but no one yet has managed to even lie convincingly about coming close. He is too fast, too clever, and lives too deep in the deep desert - no one who cares has the resources to hunt him long. 

And now here he is, brought low and hurting, and Rey’s heart hurts for him. 

Up close, he looks like a cross between a Corellian sand-panther and a vornskr, all long sleek lines and purposeful lethality. His coat is grey atop, white at the belly and chest. And his one visible eye is startling in its pale blueness, the rage at her presence fighting with exhaustion as the light behind it dims and sputters. 

Luckily, the scrap metal and remnants of upholstery that Rey has scavenged today can be fashioned into a serviceable travois; by the time she’s done, the blue-eyed hunter has passed out from pain. As gently as she can she pushes him onto it and slowly maneuvers her swoop-speeder back to her AT-AT home in the Goazon badlands.

  
***

  
(One might wonder, as Rey does, why such a king of hunters has been brought so low. One might wonder - as Rey does not, because she doesn’t know enough to wonder this - why a predator who has survived multiple worlds and multiple threats - who has, in fact, survived the most powerful Sith of all time, assassins and crime-lords and bounty hunters - has been injured so badly by a fall and a pack of vworkka raptors, and so slow to heal. 

One might wonder, but the Force does not tell its secrets lightly.) 

*** 

He is taken by fever and delirium, too weak and too dazed to resent Rey’s nursing. 

Her nights with the flight-sims and the computer-lessons are superceded, for now, with what she can scrape together of medical and veterinary knowledge, adding it to her store of hard-won practical first aid. 

She cleans his wounds and packs them with Jakku lichen, the medicinal effects of which are half the reason sentients survive on Jakku at all. She soaks a clean rag with precious water and squeezes it into his open jaws, unmindful of the curving eye-teeth as large as two of her fingers put together. The gash over his left eye she spares a precious disinfectant wipe for, before gluing it closed with bacta-infused medpaste. She thinks he’ll keep the eye, but she’s not sure. 

She splints his right foreleg, which is broken but will heal straight. His right forepaw is, strangely, a slightly different color to his other paws - a shade or two darker, and the fur with a strange metallic shine. 

He gains health, but slowly. Rey talks to him as she tends him, and even when she’s not - explaining what she’s doing, quick asides when she’s busy on other things, jokes and tales and thoughts which finally have another being to be told to. Sometimes, when she glances back, a slit of pale blue under a half-closed lid tell her the grey hunter is somewhat awake; more often his eyes are closed. But now there is always the steady sound of his breathing, less labored by the day, and sometimes he shifts in his sleep, and the mere fact of sharing her living space with another living being makes Rey happier than she has been for years. 

***

He drifts, dreaming of nothing. There is darkness - the warm, comforting darkness of needed sleep, safe in a bed, blankets pulled over. There is light, but gentle, sweet - shaded light, not the full strength of suns at noon, a small lamp in the night. There is water in his mouth; there is comfort for his wounds. There is a voice, low and soothing, and hands that care. 

He rests. 

She is there, always - the scent of sun-warmed skin and rough-worked cloth, metal and oil and sand. Honest smells. The sound of her voice, an always-running stream of word-sounds and tones. Sometimes she sings, and his ears prick to the tune-changes. He knows her mostly by scent and sound, and by the half-glimpses, now and then, of her lit by a small display as she studies, her limned in morning light as she hand-feeds him a breakfast of nutrient-dough, champing his jaws weakly at the pasty taste of it. 

Even when she leaves for work, with the roar of the swoop-speeder that he learns to associate with her coming and going, he is surrounded by her - her scent, her things, her presence suffusing the air around him, the memory of her voice. 

He cannot escape her, yet. 

The yet stretches on. 

*** 

Rey tries out many names for him. She turns to the stories she’s coaxed out of other sentients on Niima, and tries out epic names for him, drawn from myths, for he is a grand thing and should have a grand name. “Russ, like the Wolflord of Fenris,” she murmurs, running her hands through his thick fur. “Guilliman like the hero of Macragge? Ivax like the Corellian trickster deity? Kad like the Mandalorian change-god? Luke, like the Skywalker from Rebellion legends?” (His ears twitch, but Rey doesn’t notice.) 

“No,” she decides. “None of them really....fit.” 

While she searches for a good name, a true name, she calls him “the grey one.” 

“My grey one,” in her thoughts. 

Then, simply, “My Grey.”

***

One day he’s there, sprawled across the entire back of Rey’s little living-compartment. His wounds have scabbed over and his eye is free of infection, if still glued shut. His remaining eye is open longer and its blueness tracks her wherever she goes.

The next day he’s gone. 

Rey tells herself she doesn’t mind. She’s known all along that Grey is a wild thing. She hasn’t even tried to restrain him in any way, nor to set any barriers across the door, because she doesn’t mean to trap him, to tame him, to take away any of his splendid wildness. (She doesn’t want to leash another creature to this life she’s leashed to.) She tells herself this and scolds herself for wasting even more water by crying over him.

 

***

The next day he’s back, sitting at her door as neat as anything, with a luggabeast’s hindquarter as a gift. He washes his right paw meticulously, not meeting her astonished eyes, but yowls when she flings her arms around him.

 


End file.
